Flying Hero Class (3 page)

“In one sense, you're right,” he said. He didn't like talking about the dancers like this, in the third person, in the anthropologist mode. But Tom Gullagara was comatose for the moment, and the others could not hear. “People come to see them for that very reason. That they don't care. And believe me, they
don't
care. Not in that artistic sense. And that's why they succeed.”

“Sure,” said the Englishman, mocking McCloud as a sentimentalist.

“Don't worry. They've got a powerful motive to dance.”

“And what's that?” asked the Englishman.

“They want to civilize us.”

“No,” said the Englishman, turning away with lenient little guffaws. “No. Sorry. I'm sure they're dynamite. But I just don't go for
that
.”

They're civilizing
you
, McCloud considered saying, but he'd said too much anyhow, that idea of the Barramatjara on a humanizing mission: something Bluey had confessed in anger one morning, something not meant to be repeated or used against any stray Englishman.

So McCloud switched back to mere questions of art. He was surprised to notice that although he wanted to rout the man, he wasn't as angry with him as he expected. The fellow had a crooked charm of some sort.

“As for the other kind of stuff,” McCloud continued, “you know, the dance and the art. I just wish we
could
all stop ourselves trying too damn hard. Because
they
can, and people love it.”

The Englishman seemed to have had his fun out of the argument, and now he dropped it. He stubbed out a cigarette and said his name was Victor Cale, and that he worked for the
London Daily Telegraph
.

He now did an awkward knee bend until he was on a level with Tom Gullagara's window. He squinted out through the Perspex and the rain at slurred, meaningless lights. “I hope we're not too much delayed. This French lollywater they're handing out is no use to me. Scotch is more or less heart, blood, and gender to me. Wouldn't say so in front of the wife. You wouldn't happen to have any duty free, would you?”

McCloud said he hadn't. The Englishman offhandedly cursed himself for not having gone to the trouble of fetching some.

“But I didn't have time, you see. I had to interview the secretary of state at the Helmsley Palace, and the bastard was late!”

The Englishman glanced around them, looked dolefully at the happy woman in the green dress, and, like a genuine dipsomaniac, did not seem to see her, except perhaps as a debased being satisfied with French fizz.

Meanwhile Pauline McCloud was back there, amongst the seats in the tail. Her elbows tucked in in the narrow limits of one of the middle seats, she faced a night journey which refused to begin and which she doubted the wisdom of making in any case. In that crowded tail McCloud wouldn't even be able to sit beside her and try appeasement. They could perhaps have a muffled, elliptical talk outside the bank of lavatories, while polite
fraus
—returning from visiting their war-bride sisters in New Jersey—came and went, excusing themselves.

The Englishman wandered off without warning. McCloud could hear him—genially imperious—urging a steward to release some whiskey to him. The steward invoked a new federal regulation. The bar, at least as regarded spirits and cocktails, was to remain sealed until the plane achieved international airspace.

“Come on, man,” Cale could be heard saying, slipping ironically into the New York idiom in a way which should have made the steward want to hit him. “The Grand Republic lies behind us, Sonny Jim. Either we crash at takeoff, son—in which case my blood alcohol will be burned off, wouldn't you say?—or else we're as good as in God's own sky right now.”

Glancing over his shoulder, McCloud saw the steward pressing some whiskey miniatures and a glass with ice into Cale's hand.

“You're a Christian, man,” said Cale sarcastically.

Bluey Kannata had risen from his seat, climbed over Wappitji's legs, and come sauntering down the aisle. He nodded sagely at Mungina the
didj
player and had just about passed McCloud when' he bent like a bird swooping, an appropriately balletic movement which startled McCloud just the same.

“Hey, mate,” he whispered. “They gave the Pommy bastard whiskey, mate. Why don't they give us whiskey?”

“He had to be rude to them to get it,” McCloud told Bluey.

McCloud could feel Bluey's impishness, like a minor electric crackle in the air. “I reckon it might be some more of that race discrimination, mate. What do you say?”

But he was smiling in his crooked way. All the curses he had so recently believed to have descended on him were forgotten.

“No. Listen, Bluey, just go to the toilet like a dancer on tour and leave it till we take off. The Englishman had to admit he was an alcoholic out loud.”

“Well,” said Bluey, “a little more working on it, and you and I could fit that ticket. Eh, mate?”

But then with one quick, somber wink, he had straightened and gone.

It was believed that men of Whitey Wappitji's or even Bluey Kannata's level of knowledge could render themselves invisible. Could insert themselves through an aperture in time and inhabit for a moment a parallel but not apparent world or scheme, but one from which they could intrude and act on the seen and the known. Critics had even said Wappitji and the others danced like that, always on the edge of disappearing, a remarkable but habitual achievement. Not art so much as shadow play.

Sometimes, as now with Bluey, they even walked like it.

In following Bluey's hypnotic passage aft, McCloud's eyes met those of the Japanese-American woman, the nisei or issei in the green dress.

“Hello,” said McCloud.

“Hello to you,” she replied. “Daisy Nakamura.”

She had surrendered her name innocently and without caution. In the same spirit, McCloud surrendered his.

The captain had just announced that they were waiting for a wheelchair passenger. There was so much demand on airport wheelchairs tonight, he'd told them in that rural, easy way favored by airline pilots; the voice of the common man exalted to technological management of this prodigious machine.

“If it weren't for the big winds off the Great Lakes,” the nisei or issei woman told McCloud, her face succulently earnest, “we'd be hours late into Frankfurt. When I flew out of Flagstaff at dawn, I swear there was a fresh three feet of snow on the ground, and it was drifting. You couldn't see the San Francisco Peaks. I had those winds on my tail all the way flying here, couldn't drink a cup of coffee it was so rocky. But the weather's a little milder now. We should get what's called positive assistance over the Atlantic, but it won't spill our drinks.”

McCloud took in the fine, broad features leaning toward him across the aisle, her sublimely sculpted features. He could imagine some airline official assuring her at the check-in counter.
Oh no, ma'am, no more weather problems. From now on only positive assistance
.

McCloud kept watch over any reflex desires, though. He wanted to achieve a worthiness, a greater leverage, perhaps, against the time he would get a chance to speak to Pauline.

“Where are you from, Mrs. Nakamura?” he asked. He risked the
Mrs
. since there was something connubial about her which denied the evidence of her single-girl green cocktail dress.

“Oh, I'm from a place named Budapest. Northern Arizona. Navajos and Mormons and cowboys called Kelly and Campbell! And then truckers—there's always scads of truckers! And Colorado River rafting guides and back-country mule wranglers. That's about the sum total of the Budapest traffic. This is just about my first time out of Arizona, though I did go to Salt Lake once to see the temple up there, the one with the golden angel on the spire. It's certain it's my first time out of the U.S.” She dropped her voice. “Why, I bought no more than a small coach ticket, and here they just upped me to first class as if I knew the board of directors. See, what happened, they gave my preselected seat to a fairly antsy asthmatic gentleman who always takes a particular bulkhead nonsmoker. That meant there was just one other place they could put me. The luck of the Irish!”

She could laugh very ripely, like a woman who had not yet learned to be careful. McCloud felt sure Pauline wasn't laughing like that, back there in her straitened seat.

“Your friends?” said Daisy Nakamura, gesturing toward the dance troupe. “They're African gentlemen or something?”

He told her who they were.

“Wild!” she said. “You don't mean it! You say they paint the set they're going to dance on?”

“Yes. And not just with any designs. With designs they own, that they're entitled to use. People come at noon, bring a hamper with smoked turkey and champagne, and watch them work all afternoon, getting the dance cloth ready, painting the designs. And then in the evening, without rehearsal, they dance around what they have painted. Well, almost without rehearsal. They need what are called lighting and technical rehearsals.…”

“I'll be switched,” Daisy Nakamura breathed. “Out our way, we got the Navajo, like I said. Very mysterious people, too.” She waved her hand as if resisting a burning sensation. “
Very
mysterious, sir, let me tell you. And some Hopi, too, working on a water project. Mysteriouser still. Heavy dudes! Mean drinkers, the ones that're drinkers. Real mean drinkers. Though there's no meaner a drinker than a Mormon breaking the rules of a lifetime!”

In the end McCloud could not in the course of talk help asking why she was going to Frankfurt.

She volunteered the information that she had a sister who was married to an American officer in West Germany, at an airfield not far from Munich. She hadn't seen the sister for six years. “Now I'm a widow,” she said improbably, since her sumptuous green dress seemed to have little to do with widowhood. “I want to be close to family, you know how it is. When I was married to Mr. Nakamura, Ronnie … my life was so full I just didn't have the urge to go visiting. And we were so busy with the roadhouse. We have this roadhouse called the Polka Barn. Ronnie bought it from a Polish gentleman who wanted to move to San Diego. You can only work those long hours with someone you have a special thing with, like Ronnie and me. We had a special thing.”

Pitiable remembrance had entered her face.

“I'm sorry,” she continued. “I suppose I'm lucky, with a chance to visit my sister. The leisure to go all the way over there to Frankfurt.”

With a lustrous sensuality still shining in her face, even in bereavement, how the gentlemen of Budapest, Arizona, must have longed to offer her fraternal comfort!

She said, as if in fact she read the thought, “Oh, I had lots of friends. Ronnie never was strict. And he was a good quarter century older than me. What they call an issei. Him and his parents were in the detainment camps out there in the wilderness during the big war, and my parents were, too, though the two sets didn't really know each other well. Ronnie himself was a kid in the camps, and his brother fought in the American issei battalions in Italy and was killed. When the war ended, my folks were scared of going back to California, so they stayed on in Arizona, market gardening near Flagstaff. Arizona people aren't too bad. Very short on college professors, a place like Budapest. Very short on great minds of the Western world and table manners. Kind of limited, like I suppose I am. But not bad people. If you stick with them.”

She hooded her eyes and let her mind run on the clientele of the Polka Barn and the populace of Budapest.

“And I had lots of these friends, guys who were casual with me, and Ronnie was kind of lenient. But when Ronnie went, all those friends, men and women, didn't mean anything at all, sir. All I wanted to do was draw close to my own blood, to my sister and the others. Why, I went all the way out to Los Angeles, to the Japanese fishing fleet, for the Shinto funeral of an uncle I'd only met when I was a kid, and never once since. I really liked that—that was a
real
funeral. The Shinto priest chanting in a beautiful black robe, and the fishing boats bobbing around out there behind his head on the Los Angeles River. Oh my, I even grew a little sad that Ronnie and I were Methodists. But you can't be Shinto in a town like Budapest. It's a town with some goodwill and nice people. But their range don't extend to Shinto.”

A sudden shriek of engines told Mrs. Nakamura that she couldn't pursue any further for the moment the question of ancestral religion versus Methodism in Arizona. One of those plane tug machines had torn them away from their inertia and was harrying them out into the dark, toward what McCloud thought of as the unlikely duty of taking wing.

There was always this excitement for McCloud to anticipate: by the end of a long flight, the aircraft seemed an entirely different vehicle than it had seemed at the start, as if while it sliced through the time zones it left some of its old nature behind and grew new matter, a new atmosphere, appropriate to the fresh hours it was screaming toward. Not even smoke fug or the stale recycled air ever convinced him it was otherwise.

CHAPTER TWO:

Taking Off and Taking Over

From the trolley he ordered white wine—he would have enjoyed Scotch, the drink of the man from the
Telegraph
, Cale. But then Whitey Wappitji, on his way to the toilets, might see and give that little ironic flinch of the forehead and eyes, the one which implied that as a troupe they, McCloud maybe in particular, weren't setting Bluey Kannata much of an example.

Waiting for the wine, McCloud stood up and explained to a steward dispiritedly, without any hope of favors, that he was going back to visit his wife. The plane banked briefly, and he had a glimpse of Long Island suburbs below and the Atlantic blackness beyond. Probably even down there, a long way northeast of the magic city, they had seen Whitey, Bluey, Paul Mungina the
didj
man, on their televisions. They had seen Cowboy Tom Gullagara and Philip the Christian. The more modest fame he himself had come to New York for had evaded him, and despite his professional joy at the Barramatjara's unrivaled success, those moist lights below struck him now with a deadly wistfulness.